The counting was interrupted by the soft clapping of sandals on limestone. Anytus turned to find his son stumbling toward him from the other side of the portico. Prodicus’s face was bloated and pink, his frog-green mantle dragged ridiculously at his feet.
“What is this place?” shouted the young man. “I had a hell of a time finding you. What are you doing here sulking with your fat dog?”
“You’re drunk,” said Anytus. “It’s not even opening time for the market.”
“That’s my business.” Prodicus flopped down on the opposite side of the bench from his father, tossed off his sandals, and began devouring the bread and the figs.
“You eat like a Boeotian,” Anytus said to his son.
Prodicus glared at his father, then resumed eating. His chomping and guzzling echoed off the back wall of the building. Crumbs dropped to the floor. When he had consumed all of the food and the wine, he stood up and withdrew from the folds of his tunic a piece of papyrus. He slapped it down on the bench without looking at his father. “A message for you from the King Archon, delivered to the house at dawn.”
“Did the King Archon’s secretary see you drunk?” asked Anytus. He sighed. “No matter.” The tanner unrolled the papyrus, whose seal had already been broken, and read its contents. Scowling, he crumpled up the letter and threw it to the floor. “Callias says the Sacred Vessel has been sighted off Sunium and will arrive at the Piraeus tomorrow. He says that he cannot legally delay the execution of the old sophist any longer.” Anytus laughed bitterly, showing his two missing teeth crushed by a Spartan stone in the Pylos campaign. “Why is he telling me this? The entire city knows that the ship has returned. Can’t legally delay the execution! As if Callias ever lifted a finger to save Sokrates. Always the politician, that Callias. He’s playing both sides.”
Prodicus remained standing, glowering at his father and twirling a fig seed between his fingers. No longer did he appear intoxicated, although he had just drunk most of the wine, intended only for dipping bread.
“Is this why you came here?” asked Anytus. “To deliver this laughable message? Next time, send Pronapes or Charinades. When I want to see you, you are gone for days at a time, and when I want to be alone, as at this moment, you hound and harass me. Leave me, Prodicus. Go back to your carousing, go back to your drunken cronies. Here, here’s a swallow of wine you didn’t finish.” Anytus kicked the silver wine cup on the floor toward his son. The shallow vessel fell over and slid across the smooth stone, trailing a thin line of red liquid, reached the edge of the north façade, and clanged down the limestone steps one at a time to the street. Then the little portico became silent again.
If only that stillness would last, thought Anytus. If only I could be left alone and in silence. I am tired of talking and of being talked to. I am tired of thinking. Anytus closed his eyes and once more began massaging his poor head. Despite his wishes, a low buzz was now rising from the direction of the market, the comingled rustlings and mutterings of perfume hawkers and olive farmers, oakum sellers and lampmakers, charcoal vendors and fishmongers all setting up their cloth-covered stalls, money changers testing out the day’s rates, the tin and grain merchants, cobblers laughing disdainfully at the shoes of the first passersby. Much closer, the squeals of a pig being chased down a street, a child bawling. The City of the Owl was awakening.
Still standing in front of his father, hands on his hips in a defiant posture, Prodicus said, “How does it feel to be responsible for the death decree of the wisest and best citizen that Athens has produced? Tomorrow, you will become famous forever, at last the important man you always wanted to be.”
“Leave me, Prodicus,” said Anytus, his eyes still closed.
“How does it feel, Father? Father! I would rather have been sired by a goat.”
“By Zeus, leave me. Pyrrhias. Pyrrhias.” Anytus opened his eyes and beckoned to his servant. “Pyrrhias, please take my son out of here. Give him some drachmas and take him to the market. Take him to the cockfights. Just get him away.”
Pyrrhias, who had once been forced to swallow a fistful of worms by Prodicus, took one step toward the green tunic but no more. He looked nervously at the son, then the father. As if somehow satisfying Anytus’s command by mere motion, he held up his arms and stretched out his hand in front of the bright sun, which now flooded headlong into the portico and created great pools of light on the smooth limestone floor.
“I will be delighted to leave,” said Prodicus to his father, “and without your dirty money. But first I want you to know something about the man you have condemned.”
Anytus sighed, his tunic readjusting itself over his middle-aged paunch. “I know a great deal about your self-anointed wise man,” he said softly, so as not to jostle his head more than he had to, “and he is as dangerous now as he was twenty-five years ago, before you were born. He is a rabble-rouser.”
“You know little about him. This I will tell you, but only because Crito sat on me. On the walls of his prison cell, he has drawn a pictorial history of the human soul. With charcoal. I have seen it. There are thirty-nine panels, one completed each night that he has been caged in that smell hole, waiting to drink the hemlock.”
“I see that I cannot prevent you from consorting with him in prison any more than I could when he was at large in the city,” sighed Anytus.
“The jailor lets in anyone who wants to see him,” said Prodicus tauntingly. Anytus made a mental note that he would talk to the Eleven about prison security.
“Tell me what you have seen on the walls of his cell,” said the tanner, closing his eyes and resigning himself to more insults before his son would at last disappear.
“I’ll tell you, but you won’t understand. Sokrates has drawn what he is too modest to speak. He has revealed his true self and the selves of us all. On the floor of his cell are the gods, the cities and sea vessels of men, the battles and love affairs, the fluted adventures. A wild jumble of lines is Chaos, the origin of the world. Laughing Hephaestus splits open the headachy skull of Zeus with his bronze ax to unleash Athena, her eyes shining, her javelin ready. Our Athena, the goddess of our city.” Prodicus stopped here and shot his father a look of disgust. “And to think that one of your phony charges against him was godlessness. In other panels, Prometheus mixes the soil with his tears to make the first man. Then the great Ages—the Gold, in which men were happy in their festivals and died as if slipping into sleep; the Silver, in which men became timid farmers, obeying their mothers like sheep; the Bronze, which turned men into soldiers, constantly cutting each other’s throats. And finally the Iron, in which men respect neither vows nor justice nor virtue. There are lean sailors from Corinth founding the city of Syracuse, beautiful women seducing men beside rivers, gowned maidens picnicking in the shade of plane trees, colossal temples overlooking olive groves in Gela, Metapontum, Sybaris, Selinus, and other places I don’t recognize. Ships carrying tin and silver from Spain, artisans sculpting from white marble. The beginning of the Great Peloponnesian War and our disgraceful Athenian defeat.”
Several citizens strolled by the octagonal garden outside the portico, vaguely on their way to the market. Pausing, the young man in the green tunic looked toward them, then toward the southwest. The sun was just starting to glint off the Great Temple high on the Acropolis, at this distance a striated white pearl hovering above the rooftops of the city.
“Are you still listening?” asked Prodicus. “As splendid as it is, all that lies on the floor pales beside what resides on the ceiling. On the ceiling of the cell, standing on the shoulders of his friends to reach it, he has portrayed the souls. The great human soul, out of which all individual souls radiate and return, is a giant myrtle plant. It floats above every small and faded episode of earthly existence. It holds within its leaves the absolute good, the absolute virtue, the absolute beauty, the absolute truth. In the gradual unfolding of time, the myrtle occasionally sends a slender vine down the wall to make contact with mortal flesh, then
to return. These tender shoots are the single souls of individual men. But mortal flesh can know nothing. As human events take place on the floor below, the great myrtle-soul on the ceiling barely changes. It gently sways, as if caught in some mild Elysian breeze. It beams and contains and sings like soft trumpets.”
Anytus sneezed and his head resumed pounding. What were these strange words from the mouth of his crocked son? He was startled as much by his son’s extraordinary oration as by the prisoner’s drawings themselves. The situation was worse than he had believed. Prodicus did not merely follow the old sophist through the dirty streets of the city. He was deeply under his spell.
“Let me ask you something,” said Prodicus. “Do you believe in anything?”
“I believe in democracy.”
“Democracy! Democracy? Is destroying the greatest thinker in our city democracy? No, you’re not just destroying a man. You’re destroying the world.”
Anytus looked up from the floor, looked at his son, taller than himself by half a foot. Unexpectedly, his red itchy eyes saw not a twenty-three-year-old man but a six-year-old boy with a favorite mutt that followed him everywhere. It was a particular day, before the Sicilian Catastrophe, before the blockade. Summer. He and Pasiclea and Prodicus had gone down to the Piraeus to escape the savage heat of the city, leaving all of their servants behind. They had found a quiet cove away from the harbor, they could just see the tops of a few masts in the distance. Pasiclea prepared lunch under the shade of a plane tree, and he and his son stripped naked and dove into the water for a swim. Prodicus laughed in the coolness, then hit his head on a submerged ship’s plank and went under. Suddenly, the ocean stopped, turned to stone. Anytus, wailing, pulled his child from the stone sea and carried him up the hill, cradled him unconscious in his lap, kissed his blue cheeks. An unmeasurable time later, Prodicus miraculously opened his eyes. He looked into the eyes of his father and whispered weakly, “Father, are you angry at me?” At that moment, forever etched in Anytus’s mind, the sad notes of a cithara floated over from the harbor. Where had time gone? Where was that son?
Prodicus had finished speaking. He put on his sandals to leave, gathered up his drooping tunic, and threw a one-obol coin in the direction of Pyrrhias.
Anytus felt drained. He felt limp. He slowly stood up and reached toward his son. The wetness in his eyes could easily have sprung from his allergies. “Come sit here beside me,” he said softly. “Your mother and I are planning a pleasure trip to Aegina next month. Will you come with us?” He looked away. “The wine is good in Aegina.”
“I am occupied,” said Prodicus. “Besides, the world ends tomorrow.”
“Sit here with me, my son,” repeated Anytus. “Please. I am your father. Haven’t I taught you anything?” The tanner’s head was pounding, but he ignored the pain.
For a fleeting moment, Prodicus hesitated, as if remembering something. Then his muscles tightened, the corners of his mouth became hard again. “Yes, you have taught me,” he said. “You have taught me drinking and whoring.”
“Can’t you see what that old man has been doing to you?” Anytus shouted, his head ripping open. “He doesn’t care about you. He’s using you.”
“He is planning an escape,” said Prodicus. “And I will help him.” Without uttering another word, the young man departed through the south side of the portico. The tanner sank back on the white marble bench, which was now covered with blue morning shadows, and buried his face in his hands.
He did not look up when a buck-toothed but pretty slave girl walked by the portico with two children in tow and happened to spot Anytus’s slave inside. “Pyrrhias,” she whispered in surprise. “What are you doing here?” Pyrrhias heard her and became agitated, turned and put his fingers to his fat lips with a pained expression on his face. She stood for a moment and looked at him longingly through the fluted columns. Then she walked on.
“Wasn’t that Iphigenia who just called you from the street?” asked Anytus, without looking up.
“What, Master?”
“The young woman who just called you from the street.”
Pyrrhias hesitated. “Yes. She’s nothing, Master. She’s of no consequence. I’m sorry she disturbed you just now.”
“She’s been visiting the house for six months now. Does she make you happy?”
A perplexed look overtook the slave’s face. “Happy? Sometimes, when she’s not screaming at me.” Pyrrhias smiled, embarrassed.
The slave leaned over and began rubbing his master’s shoulders, gathering flesh and letting it go. “Your son is too full of himself,” Pyrrhias said softly.
Without raising his head, Anytus wrapped his hand around the back of his slave’s neck, gently but firmly, and said, “Pyrrhias, you know that you are dear to me, but don’t ever speak ill of my son again, even once. Do you understand me?”
“I did not mean any ill will, Master,” said Pyrrhias, shaking.
Suddenly the light fled from the portico, the pools of sun on the floor evaporated. “Great Apollo,” Pyrrhias exclaimed. “Clouds at this time of year?” Indeed, stony dark clouds had abruptly appeared in the sky, blocking the sun. In the distance, the Great Temple vanished as if it had never existed. Roofs turned to black slabs. On the back wall of the portico, the prancing horses and foot soldiers in the mural of Marathon faded into darkness. The tanner stared at the vanishing figures and it seemed that he, too, was fading into darkness, headed toward the fearful place. He shuddered. He put his hand under his mantle to feel his heartbeat. “Oh, most holy Artemis,” he whispered toward the gray bust outside the portico, “great goddess of the hunt and destruction, bring me prosperity, for I have always honored you.” Anytus held his eyes on the statue for some time, then lowered his gaze to the floor.
“I want to see Sokrates,” he said finally.
Pyrrhias smiled. “You will prevent his escape, won’t you,” he said.
Anytus wrote something on a piece of papyrus, squinting in the low light, and spent some moments sealing it with his sardonyx seal ring. “Please take this to Xanthias of the Eleven. You might find him at the Prytaneum after the market has closed. I have requested that Sokrates be escorted into my keeping for the rest of the day. I’ll be waiting for him at the tannery. Xanthias will know how to make the arrangements. And afterwards, go back to the house and tell Pasiclea that she will not see me until dinner tonight.”
“Everything will be done as you wish, Master. You can trust me.” Pyrrhias took the papyrus and vigorously shook his leg, which was still stiff from squatting on the stone floor.
RED WANT
STUDY QUESTIONS
• Use the Internet to find out what a cicada is and in what climates they live.
• Why would a democracy allow some people to be slaves?
• How did people send messages and communicate with each other in ancient Greece? Compare with the methods of communication today.
• Describe how Anytus and Prodicus feel about each other.
• Is Anytus superstitious? What are the gods he believes in?
• Use the BkSp key and the @ key to rewrite the opening scene of the Dialogue so that Prodicus will be happy to see his father when he first arrives in the portico.
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Alexander turned from the computer screen and smiled at his ultra-high-frequency Stademeir speakers, suspended on wires from the ceiling. A new tune from Red Want was playing. Whenever you look at me, I want to have your baby, baby. The Stademeirs swung back and forth on their wires, propelled by the acoustical thrust of 120 decibels of sound. Alex looked at his watch. It was 1:45. Yawning, he logged off the computer and went down to the kitchen to see if his mocha frappe was still intact in the refrigerator.
That night, at dinner on the screened porch, Bill could no longer conceal his numbness. To maneuver his fork, he had to grip it so tightly that his fingers turned white.
“I want you to see a doctor tomorrow,” said Melissa. Why hadn’t he told her earlier? she asked. Was it related to the incident on the train? Could it be from the blow to his head? She grasped for his hands and kissed them.
He didn’t know what to say and stared at the delicate thinness of her wrists.
“I need to sleep,” she said. “I’m going up to bed. Will you come with me?” She moved her chair back but remained at the round wicker table, carefully folding and unfolding her napkin. Overhead, the basket of pink fuchsia swayed in a puff of evening breeze.
Diagnosis Page 9